It’s no exaggeration that Uber, Lyft and other ridesharing companies have completely rewritten the rules of ground transportation.
But what exactly are those rules?
Ridesharing isn’t like renting a car or even hailing a cab. It has its own peculiarities (your driver gets to rate you), pitfalls (like the vomit scam and surge pricing) and perks (you could save money).
Booking a tour is supposed to make your trip easier. It would have definitely helped Howard Leight avoid the panicked moment when he thought he would miss his flight from London to Philadelphia.
Leight had purchased a post-cruise transfer between Southampton and Heathrow Airport through Viator. But when his ship pulled into port, no one was there to meet him.
“The driver never showed up,” he remembers. After frantic efforts to contact Viator and track down his ride, Leight finally hired a more expensive cab to get him to the airport on time.
Viator charged him $182, anyway.
When it comes to cruising, everything has changed.
Ross Copas should know. He and his wife, Jean, were on a Holland America cruise in 2020 when COVID-19 shut everything down. The couple had a front-row seat as the cruise industry battened down the hatches for the pandemic storm that followed.
Canceled cruises. Mothballed ships. And those future cruise credit vouchers no one could use. Copas lived through the drama in real life, but it felt like the apocalyptic end of a disaster movie.
And now, with the worst of COVID behind us, he’s been patiently waiting for things to go back to normal.
“We’re ready to cruise again,” says Copas, an industrial electrician from Tweed, Canada.
After canceling her much-anticipated beach vacation to Kauai, Melissa Smithers thought she had $2,034 in American Airlines flight credits. But she thought wrong.
“When I went to book a trip using the flight credit, it was gone,” she says.
She contacted her online travel agency, which delivered the bad news: Her American Airlines flight credit had expired two months ago.
But how could that be? Hadn’t Expedia told her she had four more months to use her flight credit?
Filing a credit card chargeback was the last thing on Amanda Dunlop’s mind when she booked a vacation rental on Airbnb. Nor could she imagine the trouble her credit card dispute would cause.
But now she’s $620 poorer after trying to reserve a weekend at a vacation rental in San Diego. And she wants her money back.
When Reginald Leese booked a flight to visit his 100-year-old mother in England, he never imagined he’d have a customer complaint. Or that he might need to contact the CEO of British Airways directly.
But then the airline canceled his flight and promised him a ticket credit. And it didn’t follow through — for two years.
“He never received the voucher,” says Leese’s wife, Karen.
That’s when he decided enough was enough. It was time to take his complaint to the top.
But how?
It’s every traveler’s nightmare. You arrive at your destination, but your checked luggage doesn’t.
It happened to Dick Helms and his wife on a recent flight from Paris to Prague on CSA Czech Airlines. They were on their way to a river cruise, but their checked bags with all of their clothes and toiletries never showed up at the luggage carousel.
What now?
What does your airline owe you if you voluntarily give up your seat on a flight — or have to give up your seat? What if you’re denied boarding on your next flight?
Passengers like John Keohen want to know. He flew from Minneapolis to Naples, Italy, via Chicago. During his stopover, a Lufthansa representative offered him $800 to give up his seat and take a later flight — what’s called a “voluntary” denied boarding.
Why? Lufthansa had overbooked his flight.
“We took him up on that offer,” Keohen says. Lufthansa told him to contact the airline when he got home to get his money, a violation of federal law.
But his troubles were just starting.
If your flight is canceled or delayed, do you deserve a refund?
Evelyn Fink thought so after American Airlines repeatedly dropped her flights from Dallas to Anchorage over several months. And she was right.
But instead of quickly returning her $569, her online agency sent her a series of denials. No, sorry — they were keeping her money.
She was furious.
Bob Hood is planning a trip to New Zealand next year, hopefully long after the pandemic. But like many travelers, he’s confused about travel insurance. Specifically, he’s wondering if he’ll need travel insurance after the pandemic.
